seconds and hundredths of seconds i have left. nothing left to chance in this conference. there's a trap door right underneath me, too. so you'll be out of here by 5:00, maybe even a little bit before. i want to give you two examples of these linkages. the first is the bloody stalemate -- the apparent stalemate in virginia and georgia during the summer of 1864, the incredibly bloody summer of 1864. grant and sherman seemingly bogged down, threatened republican prospects in the elections of 1864. prompting lincoln's pessimistic blind memorandum in august that predicted defeat. happily for lincoln and his party and all who hoped to make emancipation a sin quinn nothing of any peace settlement, sherman

delivered speeches that completely reversed them, those two events did. similarly r.e. lee's triumph in july 1862 reversed a downward spiral of confederate morale that gained momentum following a series of terrible defeats in the western theater and mcclellan's near approach to richmond between march and late may with the most important army of the united states. lee's ascension to command of the army in northern virginia during that campaign must be reckoned one of the great turning points of the war, one of the great moments of decision of the war, not only for the revolution that lee would bring in confederate expectations of victory but also because his skill and his skill alone probably lengthened the conflict by more than two years which in turn made possible the addition of emancipation to union as a condition for eventual peace.

my second example concerns the process of emancipation. this top has provoked considerable debate among historians who assessed the roles of abraham lincoln, the united states congress and african-americans who sees freedom by running away from farms and plantations to areas under union control. the concept of self emancipation has been at the center of much of this debate. its advocates saying that lincoln, the great emancipator has been given far too much credit in the past, that most of the credit should go to the slaves themselves for having the key role of killing the institution, by their action of going to union armies, argue those who take this position, they forced a reluctant president and congress to take up the issue. lincoln supporters concede for too many decades black people hadn't been part of the story. but they insist that lincoln's actions still should remain central to any understanding of

how the emancipation agenda was advanced. what gets lost in most of these discussions is the absolutely decisive role of military events in the process of emancipation. only when united states armies drew near did slaves have the option of making a dash for freedom. self emancipation without the military component would have been unthinkable. similarly lincoln's emancipation proclamation would have remained an empty threat to con federal slave holders in the absence of operations that brought ever greater swaths of the confederacy under united states military control. the u.s. army functioned as a revolutionary agent for freedom. even ironically even conservative officers such as william te couple sus sherman who cared almost nothing about eager black people or emancipation and yet made possible the liberation of scores of thousands of slaves during his campaigns in georgia and the carolinas.

robert gould shaw who would command the 54th massachusetts infantry, but was then a captain in the second massachusetts got to the heart of the matter in a letter from his mother in 1862. the proclamation of emancipation has come at last. i suppose you're all very much excited about it. for my part i can't see what practical good it can do now, he underlined practical ooeps. wherever our army has been, there remain no slaves, and the proclamation will not set them free where we don't go. he is absolutely right in that statement, absolutely right. the geography of emancipation confirms the correctness of shaw's observations. union armies arrive soonest and stayed longest in parts of northern virginia and the virginia peninsula. the lower mississippi river valley, parts of tennessee and

areas along the south atlantic coast. those are the regions of the confederacy where slavery was most disrupted, where the largest number of continue bands, as slaves who made it to union lines were called, made it to freedom. where the union army didn't go, texas the interior of alabama, parts of south carolina to name three places, slavery remained largely intact, even though the slaves who lived there certainly wanted to be free as much as those who lived anywhere else. we need to remember, only about one in seven slaves were freed in the course of the war. probably 3 million still in bondage at the end of the war, maybe half a million -- wherever those half a million, they were where the united states army had been most evident. most white united states soldiers and loyal civilians eventually embraced emancipation, not as a grand moral crusade but as a necessary

military tool to defeat the confederacy, to restore the union, to punish slave holders they blamed for bringing on the war and to remove a possible source of future internal threat to the solvency of the republic. abraham lincoln recognized this and always sought to emphasize union as the great goal of the war. and emancipation as one of the tools, the military tools that would help achieve union. through this line of argument he could keep the largest segment of the white population on board with the stupendous national effort that exacted a terrible human and material toll. we always need to remember 45% of the people living in the united states are democrats. democrats don't care about emancipation. they could not care less. they will not rally to a war that they believe is primarily about emancipation. they will rally only to a war they believe is about union.

lincoln's statements make that clear. in his last annual message to congress dated december 6th, 1864, lincoln put it very bluntly. in a great national crisis like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable, almost indispensable. in this case the common end is the maintenance of the union. the emancipation of slaves, he added, stands, quote, among the means to secure that end. this is after he's been re-elected in 1864, that he's still highlighting union rather than emancipation. the military story also tells us the confederate armies could take away what the union arms had brought. slaves who had been freed by the presence of united states armies could lose that freedom of confederate arms came into the area, during the 1862 campaign we know stonewall jackson captured harper's ferry, where

hundreds of continue bands gathered after escaping their owners. many noted jackson's force recovered escaped slaves as well as capturing more united states soldiers, then surrendered again until the fall of the philippines in world war ii. a dirist quoted quite a victory at harper's ferry, several thousand taken prisoner and several hundred continue bands. another woman in fairfax county which had been occupied by union soldiers for much of the war derived special comfort from jackson's seizure of large numbers of slaves. she wrote on september 17, 162, with 12,000 yankees and immense quantities of ordnance, some sayer stores and a large number of continue bands which in yankee parlance means negro. she's paying attention to that

as well. i started with lincoln and i'll come back to him, someone who wrote his own speeches, speeches it doesn't hurt your brain to listen to which hasn't been my experience in listening to presidents over the last i won't tell you how many years, many years. on november 19th, 1863, lincoln stood on a hill that still bore the marks of raging combat. he looked out over a fresh burying ground and prophecies that the war would never forget what united states soldiers had accomplished at gettysburg. that prediction proved true as we all know. those soldiers should not be remembered only because they fought in the bloodiest and most famous battle of the war. they should be remembered as representative of all the citizen soldiers who functioned at the absolute center point of the conflict. men whose actions and example take us a long way toward grasping the origins, the

various episodes and the meaning of the war. all else did depend on the confederate arms. we should use military history in a way that enables us, for example, to comprehend not only why mcclellan retreated from richmond during the first week of july, 1862, but also how that retreat shaped the political and social dimensions of life in two nations at war. any study of the civil war that slights the importance of military affairs can yield only the most flawed understanding of our greatest national trauma. thank you. [ applause ] . the civil war airs here every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. and sundays at 11:00 a.m.

eastern. you're watching "american history tv" all weekend every week end on c-span3. this year c-span's local content vehicles are traveling the country exploring american history. next, a look at our recent visit to wichita, kansas. you're watching "american history tv" all weekend every week end on c-span3. >> for about 75 years the girl scout council used this as a troop meeting house and council activity place and as a summer day campsite. it has an interesting origin and hence the historic name is now the wichita fresh air baby camp. in the early part of the 20th

century, physicians, scientists were beginning to be aware of how illness was spread and the importance of sanitation and in 1906 congress created the pure food and drug act, and in 1912 the president created the children's bureau. this brought government possibilities for raising awareness for sanitation, particularly aimed at children. so new kind of programs were instituted, and among them were education programs for mothers and also health care programs for children at risk. and in wichita this building was built to become a summer hospital unit for desperately ill and very poor infants. about a mile east of here is a residential area that also contained wichita's two earliest

hospitals. there was a pediatrician, dr. howard norton at the wesley hospital who was beginning to be interested in this idea of infant care. they actually put up a tent in the back yard of the hospital building, it was a platform tent with screen sides and a canvas roof and they moved very ill infants for the summer out into that little tent building, and they were taken care of by nurses and student nurses. the idea was to get those infants out of the confines of the stuffy hospital, remembering that this was in an age before air conditioning and understanding how germs were spread where other ill people were being taken care of. that first summer was so successful that they then moved to a more natural setting here in the park and their second summer was held in those two tent buildings. in the third year the tents burned completely to the ground

just before the season opened in june and the women who had created the board of directors immediately began to rally the community to raise funds to build a new fireproof building, and that's the building that you see with us here today. the building -- its architectural style is craftsman. this was built in 1920. this park and the building and its setting is in the middle of a large bungalow neighborhood build in the 1920s. the architecture of the building fits right into the residential area. the architect designed this building with very special windows which are now boarded up because we've repaired a lot of them and we want to protect them from vandalism until the building is put back in use. these are triple-hung windows meaning they have three sashes, top, middle and bottom. the function is to be able to

open two sashes and create a draft through the building. of course, they have screens on them, also so that flies and other insects would be kept out of the infant's hospital room. there are windows on all four sides of the building to be able to create good cross ventilation. the building is about 2,500 square feet. it's not larnl. it has one main room that was the crib room. it's been reconfigured somewhat on the inside with removable partitions. originally they had a crib room. they had a small isolation room. they had a small bedroom for the overnight nurses because they served the patients 24 hours a day. this building is not the first one to be built in the united states by any means. kansas followed a national initiative. one of the first was located in new york city on land that was contributed by the rockefeller

family. that was a very large camp with platform tents, screened canvas. they had many different programs, not just infant care, but they had mother's education programs and summer programs for older children, also. part of the background of the creation of a program here in wichita was the fact that in kansas our secretary of the department of health whose name was dr. samuel crump bin initiated quite a statewide campaign to promote the idea of sanitation as well as child welfare. he had some pretty interesting campaigns. one was called swat the fly because people needed to be aware of how germs were carried. and he had another one called don't spit on the sidewalk. in many cities, they actually imprinted that slogan on various paving bricks and put them on

the sidewalks to remind people. i found news articles here in wichita about campaigns on our streetcars that conductors were to watch for people spitting in the streetcars. this was -- it sounds kind of silly to us now, but it was a very serious campaign to educate people. the fresh air baby camp was in operation from 1920 in this building until 1926. at that time, wesley hospital had built a brand new modern facility further away in the city. so they were able to create an infant ward. and the board of directors for the baby camp solicited the hospital and were able to move the camp program into the hospital in a special ward where they could operate it year round. and so they no longer needed this building. so they turned the lease over to

the wichita girl scout counsel at that time. it's due for rehabilitation. to begin that process we listed it on the national register of historic places in 2007. that doesn't guarantee funding or anything. the national register status is mainly an honor. it honors the significance of the building as far as the social history goes. it also honors the architecture. the first phase is to repair the roof because obviously if the roof falls in, the building will be totally lost. second phase, which we kind of already started, would be to repair the structure of the building including these important windows. we removed 14 windows from this building. took them to a warehouse setting where we could lay them out on work tables. we stripped the paint. we took out the caulking. we reglazed the glass and reinstalled the windows.

we also painted them. so they are all now in working order. they are boarded up because we want to protect them from vandalism and weather until we can get the whole building back in working order. in the end, the significance of this building is the fact that it's a physical reminder of a time when witch tans all over the community, not only the wealthy, but those who could afford any kind of contribution all came together to help solve a social problem and help those who were in need. find out where c-span's local content vehicles are going next online at c-span.org/local content. you're watching "american history tv" all weekend every week end on c-span3. all this month on "american

history tv" we're featuring programs on the 40th anniversary of the watergate break-in including panel discussions and oral history interviews recently released by the richard nixon this is american history tv, all weekend, every weekend. on c-span3. next on american history tv, andrew nagorski discusses his book, "hitlerland: american eyewitnesss to the nazi right to power." this event in new york city was cohosted by the leo beck institute, and it's about an hour and ten minutes.

thank you, i'm going to be brief, you did not come to hear me. i do want to say a word about the topic and myself and then a little bit more about our speaker. i am a reguge myself, i came to this country at the age of two. my father was a leading jewish leader for years and he was fortunately out of germany with his dieing father in palestine when hitler came to power, outside he would have been quickly arrested and heaven knows what fate he would have been his. we came here as reguges and i'm fascinated with the german history, and the third richt, i was taught by these reguges.

some not reguges the same as others. carl deutsch -- so giving an introduction to andrew nagorski, i was fine to do that. but then i realized that i needed to do his bio, so i wanted to make sure i had these things right. i knew him both in terms of his father, who played a major role in the council on foreign relations and in his association with newsweek, i don't think that i'll elaborate on all the things he did from tlrks that is not why you came. he was a major figure in newsweek, and did all kinds of substantial innovative things

and especially in coordinating the network of necessaryweek s - newsweeks throughout the world. and he was himself a very respected voice of wisdom and insight on international affairs, europe and germany in particular. he served in berlin for a number of years. his wife is polish and charming, his birthplace is scotland, he is very international. am i correct? he is very international. maybe i should let him be here on the stage rather than talking about it. this is one of several books that he has written. one of them quite fascinating about his experiences in russia

and where because of his skill as a reporter, in the soviet union, he was expelled. and others, all of them of substantial weight and insight would like to have you here. this book just appeared. we thank the baeck institute, and we want to thank you for hosting and presenting it and welcome the council general of germany and ask andy to come -- come to speak to you. we will hear his remarks and then he will take questions. and there's a reception after, thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you so much for that

introduction and thank you carol for hosting this, it's wonderful to have two organizations like this, a leo baeck institute and council on germany which i have felt involved with and tied to through so many friends at both institutions. it's a delight to be here. and just to say that bill who was the american council on germany just walked in here, as guido mentioned we were colleagues in two postings in germany and he reminded me recently that he would always -- he and other colleagues would nak fun of me in berlin because they came to my house and saw all these stacks of nazi literature and biographies, and when we were riding on the

train, i was carrying the kershaw book, and it that is a big picture of hitler on it so we were getting funny looks. i'm obsessed with this period and what happened in this period and the different perspectives on it. but i'll say in my defense, hitlerland, bill, is subtle about introducing hitler. we do not see him from the front. and we look over his shoulder, but the serious side that i think this design, which is the credit to the credit of the designer at simon and shuster is showing that i'm trying to present a different perspective. and the title is not a product of my imagination, it's something that i discovered for the first time in researching this book that american correspondence in germany in the

'30s, were talking informally about this country as hitlerland. so this was not -- this was long before disneyland. so, you had this, and so, because there have been so many wonderful books about this period, great historians, i would never have attempted to just write a straight history of this period. i think that would be going over well troddened ground and i would be hard to match it. but the reason i undertook this was two-fold, first of all, there started to be more and more books about americans and pairs and london, and of course, we all know movies like midnight in pairs and all that about the '20s which catch the popular imagination and i find them really fun too. but the more i thought about it,

and the more my wife prompted me to think about it, i realize that nobody had really looked in any detail at the stories of the americans. there'd been lots of individual memoires, but described the whole experience. i began to think, is there a story to be told here about these americans and viewing events not with the benefit of hindsight but how they saw them then. which i think is always the most intriguing question, because when we look at historical events in hindsight, we tend to think everything is so obvious. you know, a led to b led to c and it must have been evident to inch, particularly when you talk

about the rise of the nazis and hitler, it must have been evident to everyone on the scene, and if they cannot figure that out, what can we say? i started to find these memoires and diaries, some of them have been in research institutes. some in some of the unpublished documents in family collections. in a few cases from actual -- with actual interviews of people who were still alive. but, mostly from -- from what they left behind, i found such extraordinary documents. literally often in family attics that i felt i was reliving this period in a whole different way. and as much as possible in